Video file indexing

YouTube bitched at me last night because I uploaded a video with the index at the end of the file. I understand why they want it at the front of the file. This is called 'flattening' the file.

When you render a video, you do not have the index information until the file is done. Thus, most software puts the data at the end of the file. This is fine if you double click a file on your system because the player can just jump to the end of the file and read the index info and play the file without trouble.

However, when streaming a video, you do not have the opportunity to just jump to the end of the file to retrieve the index. The index contains information that may come in handy for playing. Thus, YouTube has to mess with every file in order to ensure the index is in a good place for streaming.

Now, I have no idea how to do this in my software. I bet there is a setting ... somewhere. I hate that. Software is getting to the point you just can't figure out how to get things done because there are just so many settings for every little thing that you can't keep them all straight.

Apparently, if you upload a video in just the correct format with the correct settings to YouTube, you do not have to suffer through the delay that is built in. YouTube has an amazing mechanism in place for allowing people to upload all kinds of formats regardless of index placement and they just change the format after it is uploaded. I'm impressed by the effort. It must take a massive amount of energy and some pretty nifty programming. I'm glad it works. I'm sick of the delay.